The Guardian view on Ordnance Survey maps: still a superior way to navigate the landscape

The 225th anniversary of the organisation’s first publication is an opportunity to celebrate its unique contribution to our sense of place

In his one-paragraph short story, On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire in which the level of cartographical ambition is so high that a map is made on a one-to-one scale with the imperial territory. The quest for perfect accuracy doesn’t end well. But the earliest map-makers for Ordnance Survey, which this week marked the 225th anniversary of its first publication, might have empathised with the obsessive dedication.

The 1801 OS map of Kent was 10 years in the making, its military-led production inspired by fears of Napoleonic invasion. But as Rachel Hewitt points out in Map of a Nation, her stirring account of the Ordnance Survey’s early years, its genesis also lay in an Enlightenment-based enthusiasm for comprehending and accurately representing reality. During the course of the 19th century, the entirety of the British isles was meticulously mapped through fog, rain, wind and sun, in what was described as “a wild and arduous exercise”. The surveyors, armed with theodolites, measuring chains and notebooks, saw themselves as footsoldiers serving in the ranks of Reason as they brought intellectual order to the landscape.

These days, the topographical legacy they left behind is updated through satellites, GPS and digital technologies. But just as significant has been the cultural impact of OS maps on the wider population, amid expanded access to leisure time. Science and art combined in the 20th century, as the commercial potential of small-scale productions for tourists and ramblers was recognised. Sales shot up as covers began to depict motorcars venturing down country lanes, pipe-smoking backpackers plotting a route through the Forest of Bowland, and couples wandering through the Chilterns.

One should not over-romanticise. There is a darker, controlling side to the history of maps, not least when it comes to who got to define borders and names. In his play Translations, the writer Brian Friel portrays the cultural impact of colonial power by following two British surveyors across Ireland, as they impose toponymic order on a recalcitrant Celtic landscape.

But viewed from the age of satnav instructions and Google Maps, there is a charm to cartography that the passive reception of a monotone order to “turn right after 50 metres” will never match. As well as being models of precision and order, the best maps are also a form of mysterious and evocative art, inviting us to proactively explore the world and firing up the imagination. Hewitt quotes from a 19th-century poem in which a woman yearning for her soldier husband “taught her finger” to “stray o’er the map”, tracing the represented distance between them. Countless map-readers have similarly immersed themselves in contour lines, symbols and coded colours, in order to visualise landscapes that they are about to encounter for the first time.

The rise of digital technologies means that the sight of a map poking out of a rucksack or spread awkwardly across the passenger seat of a car is less common than it used to be. But the tactile delights of vinyl records are being rediscovered and celebrated by younger consumers, amid a surge of nostalgia for the analogue age. Hopefully, the peculiar pleasures of attempting to tame an OS Landranger, as it flaps uncontrollably on a windy hillside, will also continue to be enjoyed by generations to come.